What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Throughout our project we used a digital camera. During production we learnt a lot about camera techniques for example high angles give a sense of weakness while low angles give a sense of empowerment, which helped us show our protagonists emotions. During the construction of our product we learnt a lot about different technologies’ especially the editing software (Final Cut Pro) and the music software (Garage Band). During the editing we used the basic knowledge of Final Cut Pro that we learnt from the Preliminary task alongside the techniques we learnt during throughout the main task. As we got more confident with the editing software we used more adventurous effects and more daring cuts to give our opening a more dramatic feel. One of our main difficulties was making the flashbacks look more like flashbacks than present events. To do this we wanted to make the shots look drained of their colour but had great difficulty finding the right effect, we soon learnt that the “Old Film” effect drained the colour and a blurred border gave the flashbacks a more surreal look. We also learnt about simplistic editing techniques like cutting different clips and adding fades to make it continuous. We also learnt how to make music smoothly fade in. We also learnt how to effectively make a full timeline and how to use each level of the timeline. At one point we had trouble with the sound on our timeline, as there was only one level with music causing the sound to only come from one speaker so we had to learn how to replicate the sound and put it onto another line in order to make sound more effective. We used non liniar digital editing which meant we were able to repeatedly edit different aspects of our film at different times as it was needed.

The soundtrack to our opening had to be uncopyrighted so we had to create our own in Garage Band, with none of the group having used garage band before we had to ask for help from the Studio Skills teacher who explained how to use Garage Band and helped us convert our finished soundtrack to a Mp4 file and on to Final Cut Pro so we could edit it on to our time line. We found using garage band quite difficult because we couldn't manage to create our own sound despite the fact we tried so we decided to use a garage band pre made tune. Finding the pre made sound that would be effective was challenging because there were so many and we wanted to find the perfect sound.
After we learnt to use Garage Band we started to experiment with the ambient sound effects that we already on Garage Band to give our opening a more filling sound as the voice over and the soundtrack together did not sound very good. The ambient sounds were also difficult to find because they were in abstract places, but we worked on it and eventually found effective sounds..

We also learnt different way in which to record our voice over, we started by just recording on the camera and talking right into the microphone which worked well but the voice sounded quite crackly. We then tried using the radio microphone which worked a lot better.